Alan Cumming Is Your Daddy

For years, the Scottish actor has been one of our most exciting entertainers. In Jeremy O. Harris's off-Broadway hit, he happily stepped into a new archetype.

One extremely vapid interpretation of Jeremy O. Harris’s just-closed play, Daddy, is that Harris heard the George Michael song “Father Figure” (“I will be your father figure / Put your tiny hand in mine”) and decided to turn it into a three-act melodrama. The play and the song share May-December relationships, daddy issues, nudity, brazen horniness, and a gospel choir. And the show’s most joyful moment came when Alan Cumming—who played the titular daddy—actually performed the song, with the choir on backup. After the first verse, Cumming grabbed a mic hidden above him in the Hopperesque set, pulled it close to his face, and smirked with a twinkle in his eyes to alert the audience that the fun part was coming.

As Andre, a greedy and predatory aesthete used to getting his way, Cumming deftly wove between icy control and eager, ravenous infatuation. The play’s tension would briefly break when, soaking wet from a dip in the stage’s built-in pool, he launched into the song’s chorus, with gusto and a flick of camp. Like Michael, his voice went guttural and hammy as he crooned “I’ll be your dad-dayyyyuh,” greasy and thrilling all at once. In a play that doles out discomfort like a barber does lollipops, his performance was a brief and welcome rush of joy.

Audiences are used to seeing Cumming sing and dance: he’s played the horny-devious-raucous Emcee in Cabaret three different times in three different decades of his life. And most people born before 1990 remember his balletic three-way of a dance with Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. But in Daddy, bearded and mean, the actor so often described as charming or mischievous or boyish or “deliciously cheeky” has gone gruff and stately. He is, in other words, a daddy. And he’s loving it.

“I’m embracing my daddiness,” Cumming says as he pores over two different types of fake meat meant to evoke chicken at Manhattan’s Peacefood Café. “I’m usually [referred to as] ‘Oh, the little pixie, elf-y Alan.’ And all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m the fucking daddy!’” Even with his younger castmates in the show—many, like You breakout Hari Nef and 13 Reasons Why’s Tommy Dorfman, are in their 20s—he’s found himself playing a more parental role off-stage, offering advice on the ebbs and flows of relationships. “That's life,” he says he tells them. “It constantly happens. It's actually really lovely. I'm enjoying my age.”

Cumming was attracted to Daddy because it dealt with issues he hadn’t seen acknowledged so openly in a script before. In the show, a young black artist named Franklin (played by Ronald Peet) shacks up with Andre—Cumming’s mega-rich, salt-and-pepper'd art collector—after meeting at a club and having an MDMA-fueled debate about the value of collecting art. As Franklin’s show approaches and then passes, he becomes increasingly dependent on Andre, and Andre becomes even more menacing. When Franklin’s mother shows up, skeptical of the new man in his life, the precarious strings holding the two men's relationship together fray and dramatically snap. “[They’re] both fascinating and taboo subjects: relationships with younger people, race, and how gayness is interpreted within the black community and within the white community,” Cumming says. “It's very provocative. I think the theater should be, you know.”

That much is clear in the the rapturous focus Cumming gives to all his roles and scenes, regardless of where they sit on the prestige scale: In Daddy, he was just as believable and intense singing George Michael as he is taking his love interest over his lap and spanking him with a shoe. “I like heightened style,” he says of his affinity for Harris’ text, which also includes a direction for his character to hump an enormous cloth doll. ”I don't really live in naturalism. Or realism. So I quite like it.” He exhibits a firm control over his character, even when he’s off the deep end.

After a brief stint writing horoscopes—which he made up—for a Scottish publishing house as a teenager, Cumming studied theater in Edinburgh and moved to London; at 28, while starring in Hamlet, he was recruited by Sam Mendes to play the Emcee in Cabaret, a role that Cumming reimagined via what you might call “horny sicko mode.” It was also the role that brought him to the U.S. (If he hadn’t taken that one part, Cumming says, “I would be wearing cardigans and having barbecues” in London right now.)

Since then, his career trajectory has been driven by a sort of creative ping-ponging: Cumming is an actor who loves capital-t Theater as much as he loves having fun, and isn’t worried about any contradictions that might imply. In the late ‘90s he weaved easily from occasionally campy roles in big-screen movies like GoldenEye and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Spice World and Josie and the Pussy Cats to more classically earnest roles (Emma) to a leering, leather-clad ruler in Titus, Julie Taymor’s experimental reimagination of Shakespeare’s most physically violent play. Since then, he’s made grander swings, in Macbeth, and a 2016 reprisal of his role as Emcee alongside Michelle Williams (and, briefly, Emma Stone) on Broadway. And deeply absurdist swings with Spy Kids and The Smurfs. He’s also more recently gone on two cabaret-style solo tours, one in which he sings sappy songs, and one focused on his experience as an immigrant in America.

Balance, Cumming says, is the one through-line he can see in his career. “It’s really just about what I need at the time. There's times in your life when you want to have an incredible challenge, and there's times in your life when you want to coast a bit, just have a nice time. I'm not completely passionate about, you know, The Smurfs, but I'll make sure my Smurf is as Smurfy as possible. And then you feel too fat and comfortable,” he says, and the cycle begins again. Mostly, he doesn’t like sitting still: “I think boredom is death.” In 2020, he’ll mount his first dance performance, just because it’s something he wants to try, and because he saw Juliette Binoche do something similar a few years ago, and was rapt. In 2017, he opened a bar in the East Village, called Club Cumming, which he calls his “greatest artistic achievement.”

"My ethos is, everyone is welcome, kindness is all, all ages, all genders, all sexualities."

At the end of January, Cumming threw himself a Studio 54-themed birthday party at his own bar, Club Cumming, at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night; any earlier, and he would have been competing with the venue’s screening of Rent Live. He showed up in a shaggy black mullet-y wig that constantly threatened to slide off, as well as a leopard print suit, matching tie, and no shirt, though he did have a large pendant in the shape of a weed leaf slung around his neck. This getup was just something he had laying around, he told me, in the dress-up trunk he keeps in the laundry room of his downtown apartment. Every half hour or so, he’d pop behind the bar, an absolutely geeked smile on his face, make a few drinks for people, and joke around with the actual, professional bartender.

Once the party was in full swing, a handsome clean-cut man with excellent posture hopped onto the bar’s small stage, and explained to the crowd—some of Cumming’s friends, some holdovers from Rent, some over-50 locals, a few queers dressed to theme—that “Alan requested a song with full piano accompaniment” for his birthday, and proceeded to sing “Make Someone Happy” with the help of a guy who would later accompany a few rounds of ABBA and disco songs on the stage’s piano. You could have called the whole thing corny if it weren’t so beautiful.

“Most of the time I'm not there, but when I go, I love sitting behind the bar and I love that it's this thing that's going along that has a life of its own,” says Cumming, who later that night stood at the foot of the stage, alone, dancing to “Video Killed The Radio Star” and its piano accompaniment, the way we all do when we’re just excited to watch someone make music and wiggle our hips around and do little “pew pew” motions with our hands (which he also did).

The bar started as a party in Cumming’s dressing room during his most recent run in Cabaret, in 2015. He’d double booked himself, and was filming CBS’s The Good Wife during the day and performing at night, which meant he wouldn’t have much time to go out, and needed to bring the party to him; it quickly became a phenomenon and was written up in the New York Times, where, thank God, we got to read about him asking Michelle Williams’ pajama-clad daughter, “Are those your jim jams?” Club Cumming got so popular that people would ask to buy tickets for it at the box office.

“My ethos is, everyone is welcome, kindness is all, all ages, all genders, all sexualities. A lady a couple weeks ago celebrated her 104th birthday at Club Cumming,” he says. With another winking smile, barely unable to contain the fun he’s having just remembering it: “She says the secret to longevity is that she's pickled in martini.”

Optimism and joy take work, of course, and Cumming’s career hasn’t been all cartwheels and backstage parties. His acting has scratched away at ugliness just as often as it has provided rococo choreography to Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” Cumming’s 2014 book My Father’s Son chronicled his relationship with an abusive father, and his show Legal Immigrant has had him touring the U.S. talking about his own experience as an outsider in this country, though he admits he’s had it much easier than many. That tour took him to West Palm Beach, where people mostly know him from The Good Wife: “They go, 'Oh it's that guy off of TV' and then they get me saying things about Trump,” Cumming says. “And in West Palm Beach, with all these billionaires, a man shouted at me, ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And another one said, “Get on with the show!” And I love that, because then other people shout. It becomes what the theater is for: a dialogue.”

A dual thrill to the fun and the ugly are, in part, what brought Cumming to Daddy: a melodramatic, occasionally farcical excavation of the intersection of race and sexuality and money, and all the nastiness found there. Cumming has operated in similar spaces before, particularly in 2017's After Louie, a film in which he played a queer artist and activist who had survived the AIDS crisis that took so many of his friends, and also fell in love with a much younger man who challenged his own concepts of intimacy. And there was 2012's Any Day Now, in which Cumming plays a drag performer in the ‘70s who falls in love with a closeted lawyer as they take custody of an abandoned, developmentally disabled teenager.

Cumming knows these queer narratives are important but often limited by their current indie-ness. He’s currently the star of Instinct, a CBS show that’s the first hour-long network drama with an openly gay main character, though you wouldn’t necessarily call it “gay TV.” It’s far more mainstream than the aforementioned works, but, “I feel like I’m at a time where I can reach more people with an episode of Instinct than with After Louie or Any Day Now,” he explains. “Only 200 people a night are going to see [Daddy]. So I'm thinking I want to try and do mass consumption a bit more. You know, you have shows about middle-aged women going back into the dating game. I think it'd be really good to have a middle-aged man going back into the gay dating game.”

It makes perfect sense, of course: Cumming is perhaps the best in the game at having way too much fun with a role without ever treating it like something silly. And now that he’s spent time in Daddy territory, he’s ready to test the waters. I ask him if he’s aware of the phenomenon wherein horny or adoring fans will comment a terse “daddy” on a celebrity’s picture. He stops, thinks, and slightly cocks his head in recognition: “Oh yes. I know that. I see that on my Instagram feed. That's nice, isn't it?”